Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2003 9:43 pm Post subject: new to sparc, not new to gentoo

Hello

I've got two old sparc systems, a sparcstation5 and a sparcstation20 (both sun4m afaik).
They are not killing machines but running gentoo on it seems like fun.
The station5 is booting fine into solaris 7, but the station20 is giving some problems.

It will not give output to the screen. During POST it doesn;t give errors (no leds on keyboard are on), when i press stop+a and then enter boot I can see that the system reboots. So I geuss its working fine.
So, do you know a ok prompt command so I can have output to the screen? " screen" output doens't work. Will the system work fine if the vga adapter is broken? Which program does portage has so I can see if my sparc gives any output on the serial connector?

Hello
It will not give output to the screen. During POST it doesn;t give errors (no leds
on keyboard are on), when i press stop+a and then enter boot I can see that the system reboots. So I geuss its working fine.
So, do you know a ok prompt command so I can have output to the screen? " screen" output doens't work. Will the system work fine if the vga adapter is broken? Which program does portage has so I can see if my sparc gives any output on the serial connector?

Are these systems any good for gentoo?

The sparc5 might not be, because of a problem with the linux kernel working with the processors in them. The onboard video on the 20 will only work with a vmsimm in the second to last slot, otherwise you will need an sbus card for video. To get prom output on the serial ports, start the system up without the keyboard pulgged in. DON'T use an ordinary serial cable on the sparc20's serial port! It's two serial ports in one connector.

Sounds to me like the 20 is fine, just lacking a VSIMM for the onboard video. Maybe the 5 has an sbus TurboGX card you could borrow to use on the 20?

This post coming to you from a Sparc20 Gentoo 1.4_rc3. Stick with Solaris on the 5 as far I'm concerned. Have fun! Hope this helps you.

a regular null cable works just fine on a sparc20. if you don't have the breakout cable, its treated as a normal serial port.

Oh, thanks. I thought that since it was two ports in one DB25, that the pinouts would be completely different, thanks for correcting me. Haven't had any use for the serial port on mine yet, I'll hook a modem up to it and see how well it works, I've heard serial throughput on Ss20s at high rates don't work so well.

sorry for the kick...but I havn't had any time for my sparcs the last month, now I have.

I have taken a much better look at both systems, and indeed I borrowed a vga adpter from the 5 and put it in the 20. Works perfect. But I must say that working via a terminal cable with minicom is fun.

Right now I'm gathering some information before installing gentooon on the systems/one of the systems. But, frankly, I'm afraid 32 mb is to less for the sparcstation20...and 64mb can't make the sparcstation5 fast enough. Am I right?

Where can I find a store for some sparc memory? Or do I really have to search on ebay?

There is always memory on there for sparcstations, and its pretty cheap. bump it up as much as you can afford to. I have 228 Megs on my sparcstation 20 and it does fairly well._________________-Todd <todd@gentoo.org>
-Gentoo/SPARC Developer

Did you get Gentoo running on the Sparcstation 5. I'm intressted because I get one of them in a few weeks and I was planing on trying to make a Gentoo or a LFS install to it._________________A bus station is where a bus stops, a train station is where a train stops. On
my desk I have a work station..
Nixadmins.net
FLUG member 473

well, I donated the ss5 to a friend. He has OpenBSD installed on it.
The ss20 is standing in my room...not enough time to play with it. But, want to make some time this weekend to start using the second cpu (150MHz) and the 512 MB Ram for my ss20 (bought on ebay like advised above).

As fas as I know, the ss5 and the ss20 are not that much different in hardware. So when I have gentoo installed on my ss20 I will drop a line here. However, reading the reactions on this forum, gentoo installation on ss20 and ss5 should be ok. Using it will be ok if you put enough ram in it.